Brian May's painstaking excavation of exquisite stereo photographs from the dawn of photography transports the reader back in time to the lost world of an Oxfordshire village of the 1850s. At the book's heart is a reproduction of T R Williams' 1856 series of stereo photographs Scenes In Our Village. Using the viewer supplied with this book, the reader is absorbed profoundly into a village idyll of the early Victorian era: the subjects seem to be on the point of suddenly bursting back into life and continuing with their daily rounds. The book is also something of a detective story, as the village itself was only identified in 2003 as Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire, and the authors' research constantly reveals further clues about the society of those distant times, historic photographic techniques, and the life of the enigmatic Williams himself, who appears, Hitchcock-like, from time to time in his own photographs. The product of more than 30 years research, the mixture of social, photographic and biographical detail is handled with admirable lightness of touch, belying the depths of scholarship which underpin this ambitious enterprise.

This book is the perfect antidote to the stress of life in the 21st Century. It portrays the idyll of life in an 1850s village, "far from the sound of the train's whistle". The identity of the village was lost to the world for 150 years, and only by a miracle does this magical set of stereoscopic views survive, brought together for the very first time by Brian May and his co-author, photohistorian Elena Vidal. Their research is amazingly in-depth, but the book is utterly readable, and the pictures leap into glorious 3-D, viewed in the new focussing stereoscope which May has designed and produced, to bring the stereos to life, and then fold neatly into the slip-case of the book. The book gives an extraordinary insight into everyday village life at the time - with a woman at her spinning wheel, the blacksmith outside his smithy, three men at the grind stone sharpening a tool, the villagers in the fields, bringing in the harvest as well as often taking time to enjoy a good gossip. In every case the original verse which accompanied the view is reproduced. In addition, May and Vidal have researched and annotated all the views, revealing another layer of meaning, by exploring the history of these real characters, this idyllic village and its links with the present day. The result is a powerfully atmospheric and touching set of photographs." A Village Lost and Found brings master pioneering stereographer T. R. Williams's passionate life-work Scenes in Our Village to a new audience - in glorious 3-D, as never before. For an Electronic Press Kit for A Village Lost and Found click here